MEDIUM SEO GUIDE
Using Medium for SEO
Launched in 2012 by the CEO and chairman of Twitter and Blogger, Evan Williams, Medium has become one of the largest publishing platforms on the web with an Alexa rank of 140 and a membership of over 60 million as early as 2016.
Citing the need for longer posts of higher quality, Williams set about building Medium as a successor to Blogger and other websites like Tumblr.
It would appear, in 2020, that he was largely successful, and A Medium Corporation is now a huge business, with an effectively monetized readership and many influential members of society writing here, such as Joe Biden and Jeff Bezos.
Medium for SEO:
As a result of Medium’s enormous Domain Authority, many SEO practitioners are looking at the platform as an opportunity.
There are several reasons for this:
- Medium posts include their own SEO settings
- Medium includes high-ranking “Publications” such as The Writing Cooperative and The Atlantic
- Medium is free to use and has a huge audience
- One 2016 article claims that Medium has become “The Best SEO Platform of All Time”
How to use Medium for SEO:
There are several ways to use Medium for your own SEO, and we will talk about each method in detail below.
Reposting your blog — Medium’s ‘Import Story’ feature is an excellent way to repurpose your existing, high-performing content and find a new audience.
Doing this will also create a backlink to your website. This backlink will be “nofollow” which means it won’t help you rank, however it will send consistent referral traffic to your website, which is definitely a good thing, and you’ll want some nofollow links in your backlink profile anyway as these are natural.
Similarly, the SEO settings allow the use of the Rel=Canonical tag, which indicates your site housed the original article.
Using the SEO settings — Medium posts like this one empower you to craft custom SEO titles and descriptions for your articles, hopefully improving your clickthrough rates from search engines, which are thought to be an important ranking metric.
Image Source: Medium
Advanced SEO — Medium’s excellent editor allows for the creation of beautiful, engaging posts that are optimised for mobile, load quickly, and are highly shareable.
These are all signs to Google and other search engines that these posts should rank highly for their chosen topics.
Medium’s posts tell you how long articles will be in both reading time and wordcount, and encourage readers to finish reading the posts once they’ve clicked into them, rewarding SEO’s with a higher “Time on Page” stat, which is a ranking factor.
Similarly, it offers powerful analytics to teach you how to write better, more engaging headlines.
